The Pre-Kripkean Puzzles are Back

Yes, but does Nature have no say at all here?! Yes.

It is just that she makes herself heard in a different way.

Wittgenstein (MS 137).

Modality was already puzzling before Kripke - there’s a tendency for the potted history of the thing to make it seem like just before Kripke, philosophers by and large thought they had a good understanding of modality. But there were deep problems and puzzles all along, and I think many were alive to them.

There is a funny thing about the effect of Kripke’s work which I have been starting to grasp lately. It seems like it jolted people out of certain dogmas, but that the problems with those dogmas were actually already there. The idea of the necessary a posteriori sort of stunned those ways of thinking. But once the dust settles and we learn to factor out the blatantly empirical aspect from subjunctive modality - two main ways have been worked out, more on which in a moment - the issue comes back, and those ways of thinking and the problems with them are just all still there.

(When I was working on my account of subjunctive necessity de dicto, I thought of most pre-Kripkan discussions of modality as irrelevant and boring. Now that I have worked that account out, they are seeming more relevant.)

What are the two ways of factoring out the aposterioricity of subjunctive modality? There is the two-dimensional way: construct “worlds” using the sort of language that doesn’t lead to necessary a posteriori propositions, and then make the truth-value of subjunctive modal claims involving the sort of language that does lead to them depend on which one of the worlds is actual.

This is currently the most prominent and best-known approach. However, it involves heady idealizations, many perplexing details, and various questionable assumptions. I think the difficulty of the two-dimensional approach has kept us in a kind of post-Kripkean limbo for a surprisingly long time now. Except perhaps in a few minds, it has not yet become very clear how the old pre-Kripkean problems are still lying in wait for us. I have hopes that the second way of factoring out will move things forward more powerfully (while I simultaneously hope for a clearer understanding of two-dimensionalism).

What is the second way? It is to observe that the subjunctively necessary propositions are those which are members of the deductive closure of the propositions which are both true and C, where C is some a priori tractable property. (On my account of C-hood, the closure version of the analysis is equivalent to the somewhat easier to understand claim that a proposition is necessary iff it is, or is implied by, a proposition which is both C and true. On Sider’s account of C-hood this equivalence fails.)

My account of subjunctive necessity explains condition C as inherent counterfactual invariance, which in turn is defined using the notion of a genuine counterfactual scenario description. And it is with these notions that the old-style puzzles come back up. Sider’s account has it that C-hood is just a conventional matter - something like an arbitrary, disjunctive list of kinds of propositions. (Here we get a revival of the old disagreements between conventionalists and those who were happy to explain modality semantically, but suspicious of conventionalism.)

What are these returning puzzles all about? They are about whether, and in what way, meaning and concepts are arbitrary. And about whether, and in what way, the world speaks through meaning and concepts. Hence the quote at the beginning, and the quote at the end of this companion post.